Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry's Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (review)

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 2 (Spring 2004) 418–421 DAVID B. RUDERMAN. Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry’s Construction of Modern Jewish Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. xv Ⳮ 291. In its preface, David Ruderman describes his latest book as one ‘‘I never imagined writing.’’ Well-known for his studies of Jewish thought in Renaissance Italy, Ruderman’s turn to the eighteenth-century Anglo-Jewish Enlightenment may seem a surprising departure from his previous efforts. Nevertheless, in this pioneering new book, one can detect an element of continuity with his earlier writings. His immediately preceding work, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New Haven, 1995), focused on Jews’ adoption and adaptation of scientific modes of rationality emerging from the encounter between Renaissance and humanist cultural orientations and postmedieval Jewish philosophic and hermeneutic traditions. It thus presented, at least indirectly, a challenge to standard intellectual historical approaches to Jewish modernity that have tended to sever early modern from modern Jewish history and Renaissance Jewry from the Jewish Enlightenment of the Berlin Haskalah. In this new, lucidly written, and immaculately researched volume, Ruderman takes on the regnant paradigm of Jewish modernity far more directly by exploring the neglected domain of eighteenth-century AngloJewry ’s intellectual and political activities. Ruderman argues that a distinctively Anglo-Jewish mode of Enlightenment emerged out of the peculiar intellectual, religious, and political climate that confronted English Jews in the second half of the eighteenth century, one in which the impact of Newton and Locke remained paramount . Ruderman’s focus on these figures serves dual purposes. On the one hand, their influence upon the consciousness of Anglo-Jewry reinforces the link Ruderman wishes to establish between seventeenthcentury Jewish scientism and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment of English Jews. On the other, the very ‘‘Englishness’’ of Newton and Locke allows Ruderman to portray Anglo-Jewish intellectuals as closer to the founts of intellectual modernity than were central European maskilim such as Naftali Herz Wessely and Isaac Euchel, who experienced them largely in the more culturally mediated form of translation. This assertion reflects the centrality of language to Ruderman’s analysis . Numerically small and isolated from the traditionalist masses of Eastern Europe, eighteenth-century Anglo-Jewry felt at ease in the common RUDERMAN, JEWISH ENLIGHTENMENT—KARP 419 linguistic medium of the English tongue and its texts, including England’s renowned Bible translations. English Jews’ and Christians’ common allegiance to the King James translation of the Old Testament complemented Anglo-Jewry’s appreciation of its distinctive freedom within the British polity. In contrast to their coreligionists in Germany, Poland, and Russia, native-born English Jews suffered relatively few legal disabilities, ‘‘in practice if not in theory.’’ For these and other reasons, according to Ruderman , English Jews found themselves in a comfortable exile, a fact that contributed significantly to their active participation in the cultural and intellectual life of the larger community. If the relative absence of Jewish cultural and religious insularity enhanced the challenge and appeal of missionary Christianity, the resulting complex of comfort and confrontation produced, according to Ruderman, the ingredient of creative tension that enabled Anglo-Jewry to flourish intellectually. The relatively open intellectual culture of Georgian England , its ‘‘democratic’’ constitutional ideals and religious latitudinarianism , on the one hand, and the intensive partisan conflicts over biblical emendation and the status of the ‘‘Jewish’’ Hebrew Bible, on the other, encouraged assertive, even combative Jewish participation in public debate and religious polemic. Ruderman seeks to demonstrate his thesis through elaborate and highly illuminating reconstructions of the intellectual careers of diverse Jewish authors such as David Levi, Abraham ben Naphtali Tang, John King, and Mordechai Gumpel Schnaber Levison (among others), most of whom, as mentioned, have not been much studied in their own right nor hitherto properly situated in an Anglo-Jewish intellectual milieu. Their collective portrait, set within the historical framework outlined above, leads Ruderman to define an ‘‘autochthonous’’ mode of Jewish Enlightenment in England, one that, as he asserts, would eventually exert a decisive influence on American Jews and Judaism in the nineteenth century. In...